Which new hard-drive??

Ok my Hitachi TS 5400 80gig is a peice ive come to the conclusion that it is dieing. Having to reformat every month and load times are getting so so ridiculously slow. Im trying to defrag it now and it takes like 3 hours to go 8%. Im using a Z70VA and am tired of this drive it heats up like crazy too and now DVD burning is taking over an hour on what should take 10mins the transfer times are messed up i just think the thing is slowly dieing. Anyways im gonna get a new HD for this z70VA i need recomendation on which route to go i of course want it to be fast but i also want storage of at least 100gig more if possible ( i know there are limitations on this) anyways ive decided ill upgrade the HD and then use this as a notebook and not a desktop replacement aymore. Hehe i just dont think it can handle the use and abuse a desktop can i guess i was trying to fool mysefl when i bought it sogonn build a nice new desktop but anyways. Please recomend a really good high capacity hard drive to me thanks and sorry for going on and on.

 

I can personally recommend the Seagate Momentus series - you can get 7200 and 120 GB HDD - not too shabby ...

 

didnt know this came in anything over 100gig how is the heat/sound/power usage? how are the samsung spinpoint drives been reading possitive things about them dont see any 7200 but the 5400 seems like a nice drive

 

The Samsung Spinpoint M drives are pretty decent. I've had experience with a few, and they're VERY quiet and perform well. They heat up quite a bit, but probably not as hot as the Hitachi drives. Samsung drives will give you good bang for the buck.

 

does it sounds like a hard-drive problem im experiencing? files opening slow, transfering of files slow, burning slow, boot up slow even in safemode. I dont mean just slow eaither DREADFULLY slow and it really wont defrag properly. Had a hard-drive failur a couple months ago where the pc went into a reboot loop over and over and over...

 

oh and yeh this puppy gets hot up to like 62C where the cpu and videocard stay relativley cool under max load. Oh and how much faster is the 7200 seagate 100 gig to the spinpoint?? Is it worth the price and 20 gigs less?? 150 canadian for seagate 110 for samsung.

 

I would get a Seagate just on the principle that RMA goes easily. Same for Western Digital and Fujitsu. In my experience, Hitachi and Toshiba have to be returned to the original OEM for RMA service. I think Samsung is also in the same boat.

As far as temperature, it's heavily dependent on the chassis. My SATA 120GB Seagate is reading 35C idle in my V1, but meanwhile my EIDE 80GB Seagate reads about 45-50C in my Z63A. It's mostly due to the fact that it can't breathe in that compartment very well.

Before buying, I would check Hitachi's website for their drive fitness tester and test the drive. Or get one of those USB->2.5/3.5" EIDE HDD adapters or 2.5" HDD enclosures and try it on another system. It might be that the controller or the connector for the HDD is going bad.

Also, you might want to check if there is any warranty left on that HDD you have, since this is a Z71 barebones. Chances are that the place you bought it from still has a warranty with the supplier (laptop HDDs are typically 3 years, Seagate is 5 years, Western Digital models with a BB in it are *ONE* year upgradable to 3 years in the first year only IIRC).

 

Um,

Of all the laptops on the us market, the best deal right now is the hitachi 160 gb 5400 rpm for 120$ us.

Hitachi is a great brand. If you got a bad one thats entirely possible but youd be cheating yourself to eliminate that brand for its replacement just because it is the leading edge of the technology right now.

 

hmm well i ran that driver fitness tester you mentioned AlexF and it found absolutley nothing wrong with the hard drive. Guess i just assumed that was hte problem, now i have no idea. I mean things just got so slow over that last few days. And bootup takes forever the blue cursor on the windows loading screen goes acros it 43 times thats just freakin ridiculous. Also programs take a while to load up and file transfers take forever. Maybe the OS is to blame and i just need to do another fresh reformat. Any ideas guys??

 

Check the Event Viewer under System. See if there are any block errors under disk or cdrom.

If you're saying that reinstalling helped clear up the problem temporarily and gradually starts getting slow again, chances are good that maybe you're getting spyware or viruses in your system. Are you using Internet Explorer or Mozilla Firefox? Do you have all the Windows Updates? Firewall?

 

Have you cheecked what mode your hard drive is running at? If it's been reset to PIO mode, it may account for the slow read/write speeds of the hard drive. Go into Start | Control Panel | System, select the Hardware tab, click on the Device Manager button, expand the IDE/ATA/ATAPI controllers and right click on the Primary IDE channel (I'm assuming it's installed on the primary IDE controller. If it isn't just right click on the secondary IDE channel), select Properties from the menu and select the Advanced Settings tab. The hard drive should be in UDMA mode.

 

Also try HDTune. Post pictures of your graphs and run the health and error scans.

~ Brett

 

ok for primary IDE i have device 0 and device 1 : Device 0 is set to PIO device 1 is set to UDMA if i click on hard drive properties it shows location as 0 does that mean that its on device 0? i dont know how to change it to UDMA from PIO then if thats the case i cant click to change the scoll down is on DMA if available but under that it says device 0 is in PIO mode.

 

seems that the DVD burner is on location 1 guessing that would mean that the dvd burner is running in UDMA and the hard drive is in PIO?? maybe i could change dvd burner to secondary IDE and then both would be in UDMA?? if so how would i do this?

 

No, you just need to re enable DMA on the hard drive, don't try to do more than that. If you can't do it from the control panel, then you have to do it through the registry. See: http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/device/storage/IDE-DMA.mspx
and http://www.blackmaxpc.com/Guides/Enable_DMA.htm (look halfway down the page).
Hope that helps.